Better Twitter BACN

Nearly one year ago I wrote an article for the May 2008 edition of Website Magazine that addresses the term du jour (BACN) and discussed its implications for marketers and those in the social media sphere. Thanks to the meteoric rise and increasing importance of social media, BACN has only gotten more prominent.

BACN is email you want, just not right now. From the article of last year; "Common examples include news alerts, messages from social networking sites and wiki watch lists. It’s not considered SPAM (hence ‘Bacon’) because you originally signed up for the service."

The problem (or should we say opportunity) is that many messages are not read immediately, if at all, and users can become quickly inundated with them, making it hard to keep up. Thanks to a little ingenuity however, Bacn just get tastier.

TechCrunch reported over the weekend on Topify (Beta), a service which helps make the decision on who to follow at Twitter a little (well, a lot actually) easier. There is an excellent alternative that for my purposes is equally helpful (if not better in many ways) for power Twitter users. TwiMailer does pretty much exactly what Topify does, but you won't be waiting on a beta invite. Here is how the email looks in your inbox:

As you can see, I've decided to smudge out the any reference to the individual Twitter user that followed Website Magazine, but it does give you a good idea of how it works. Those being followed change their email address in their Twitter account to one provided by Twimailer. Those empty follow message that are provided by Twitter (in the first image) now are redirected, including more interesting information such as who the Twitter users are, where they are from, their website, their most recent tweets (although not shown here) and most importantly the number of followers and number they are following.

While not for your average Twitter user, power Twitter users will be excited by this service and others (like Mr. Tweet for example) that make the marketing game and science a more rewarding and enjoyable experience.